North has a wonderful writing style that is evocative without being ornate, and clean without being stingy.

His boyhood conclusions may not always be strictly orthodox, but his attitude of humble generosity to his fellow creatures always is. Sterling wrestles with a lot of big problems: The loss of his mother, the great war, the town bully, how to reconcile biological evolution with the book of Genesis, and finally the loss of his pet raccoon.

It is in this open-eyed wonder and curiosity, shared by raccoon and boy, that Rascal’s value truly lies. There was a lot of laughter in the room when we were reading. In their various responses to his strong-willed, beautiful, destructive, affectionate pet raccoon, he plumbs the depths of their natures in a way that could be startling, if it weren’t so gentle and natural-feeling. He tells of crows and cats, lumber dealers and leather-men with the same frankness and sense of humor. “All my friends in this book, both animals and humans, were real, and appear under their rightful names.Ī few less lovable characters have been rechristened.Įven as a boy, North seems to have been a keen observer of character.

He kept a menagerie of adopted animals, some domesticated, some not, and tells about their habits with the familiarity of long acquaintance. North remembers his boyhood self as industrious, compassionate, curious, and honorable even at significant personal cost.įrom working as a newspaper boy, to spending days alone in the forest (save for his pet raccoon), to building a canoe with his own money in the family living room, Sterling lived an adventurous, self-sufficient boyhood that reads as very wholesome. Sterling’s mother died a few years before this book begins, and his father was loving but preoccupied with work, so North had a boyhood of freedom and responsibility that was unusual even at the time.

He narrates the story as an adult, retelling a treasured part of his childhood from the perspective of his eleven-year-old self. It is a story supposedly about a raccoon, but really about North’s boyhood growing up in Wisconsin during World War I - the war that affected everything yet, compared to the decades that followed, changed so little of essential American life. Sterling North’s Rascal is a gem I re-discovered by reading to my kids.

Rascal a memoir of a better era